Based on the success of the Ottawa Hybrid mirror Virginia Ruiz ran in Orlando last summer, popular demand dictates that a summer 2016 hybrid event in Orlando should happen. This year, we're planning to run a mirror of the Toronto Hybrid.

Date and location TBD --- but my initial probing of the usual Florida suspects is indicating preference for a late-June date, so probably the 18th or 25th. And most likely, I'll once again very kindly look towards Chris Borglum for letting us host at Valencia.

Once such things are worked out, I will update this ultra-preliminary announcement with more useful details.

EDIT:In a very quick turnaround, it looks like Chris is on-board to have us host at Valencia West (the usual locale). To avoid conflict with Mr. Robin Richards and his COTTAGE mirror, I'll set the date for this here as June 25th.

I'm going to ask for $50 per team, as a flat rate (cash or checks payable to "Travis Vitello"). But please bring buzzers.

EDIT: I bumped the price up to $50 after actually running the numbers and looking at the expected expenses. If I get enough teams, I might be able to bring this back down a little.

I'll set a cap on the number of teams I can support once I know more about the available resources (this will be part of an eventual update to this post).

EDIT: Chris has booked 10 rooms (but may be able to get a few more) in Building 9 of Valencia West (the "normal" location). This means I can support 19 teams (maybe a few more). The caveat is that I might be short on dedicated staff, meaning that --- at this time --- I'm intending to configure the schedule such that teams will have a bye round where they'll be expected to read.

Oh! --- since this is intended to be a fun, summer event, teams can be "open" (which I'm wholly encouraging). While radically unorthodox, I actually considered adding a small premium for teams composed of players solely from a given school to incentivize people to play with people they may not play with otherwise. But as said, this was only a consideration --- I won't actually do this.

Finally, I've asked the Toronto folks to send the questions a bit early so I can make any Americanizing tweaks to the content, as needed.

If you're interested in playing, PM me on Facebook, post here, or send me an email at tvitello AT gmail DOT com.

Cheers,

Travis

Last edited by sonstige on Tue Jun 07, 2016 3:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Travis VitelloUniversity of Florida '08The Ohio State University '14Writer, NAQT

* The field seems to be at 19 teams; while 18 is preferred, I can make 19 work (it might be argued that 19 is better, even). I've asterisked UF and Valencia since their "C" and "B" teams, respectively, may need to either take on people and/or be partly redistributed the morning of. If we stick to 19, I'll do a 9/10 RR split, followed by a 4/4/4/4/3 rebracket for 2 additional rounds. Otherwise, it'll be a 9/9 split followed by a 4/4/4/4 rebracket for 2 additional rounds (with the bottom-most team in each RR bracket converted to staff).

NOTE: Much of this set was adapted from what Toronto provided, to correct and post-edit the set where needed to improve quality and playability.

Last edited by sonstige on Wed Jun 22, 2016 2:29 am, edited 15 times in total.

Travis VitelloUniversity of Florida '08The Ohio State University '14Writer, NAQT

A "final" logistics email was sent to teams on 6/21. As said in the latest edit to my above post, the field is locked.

As it is, on paper there will likely be enough people to field 19 teams. If teams can be consolidated down to 18, I'd be slightly happier --- but if not, no big deal. I have schedules drafted up for either scenario, which will be determined Saturday morning. In whichever case, we'll end up playing 11 rounds.

Many thanks to everyone who helped me in my efforts to radically clean up and improve the question set I received --- namely Virginia Ruiz, Ian McKenzie, Jihye Shin, Billy Beyer, Kevin Comer, Alex Shaw, Taylor Harvey, Peter Torres, and Zach Foster. Needless to say, Saturday's set will look a lot different than what was played in Toronto's iteration of this event.

Travis VitelloUniversity of Florida '08The Ohio State University '14Writer, NAQT

We had 18 teams come out for this (sort of) --- as it was, we had a few last-minute drops from the field, but after a bit of shuffling some folks around, we ended up with the 18-team field I wanted (letting us have a 9/9 RR schedule). This pushed our start time back a little, for which I apologize.

Many thanks to the folks who were patient and flexible to this end.

After the RR, we re-bracketed to three groups of four teams and played two more games. Some teams hit the road after the RR, having a lengthy drive ahead of them (but were awesome enough to leave their buzzers --- thanks, Stan!).

In the end, the final rankings for the top 4 teams went something like:

As said in an earlier post, I took the Toronto Hybrid set and reinvented it --- putting a lot of effort into revamping the questions over the past 2 weeks...both in terms of editing what was sent for content and quality, but also largely replacing a significant chunk of the set with original material (plus contributions from Florida-based folks who were excellent enough to help out).

This is extraordinarily preliminary, but my inkling is to want to write my own hybrid set with a May/June 2017 delivery (maybe earlier, even). I'll keep folks on here posted if it seems like that will become a thing.

Travis VitelloUniversity of Florida '08The Ohio State University '14Writer, NAQT

So my general approach was going through each of the 10 packets I received from Toronto, at first screening for things that were overly Canadian, then realizing that I needed to screen for content that would be playable in Orlando as an answerline in general (based on my completely subjective judgment), before making editing cuts based on how well-written and difficulty-appropriate the original questions were. Some were largely fine as-is (Aayush's packet, in particular, stood out as having a decent amount of usable material). Others...not so much (but they were mostly good attempts!).

From there, I re-arranged the salvageable questions to get to as many complete packets as I could, before writing my own material or soliciting other Florida-based folks to help contribute until I had 11 complete packets. Could the final results of this effort have been better? Sure. However I was given a little less than 2 weeks to re-work an entire set while also producing an 11th packet. But I was reasonably happy with what I ended up reading to teams. Note that I had asked Toronto for the set months before my tournament (still well-after the set was first played), and was given repeated assurances the set was being worked on...only, that never seemed to have happened.

My advice to Toronto is this: if you're going to allow mirrors for a set, and make promises that the set will be heavily edited, then please make sure said set is close to perfection. Beyond the typos and formatting issues, there were some big problems with question length, clue order, phrasing ripped nearly verbatim from Wikipedia, and, amazingly, clue accuracy.

An example of what I mean is this awesome gem:

One athlete born in this country wrote about his teammate Wilt Chaimberlain in his post-NBA poetry career. A player from this country was drafted in the first round of the 2007 NBA draft before being traded to New Jersey. In the latter half of 2014, Ron Artest signed with a club team in this country which coincided with a name change on the subject of this country. Before ending with a knee injury, a cinderella run performed by a player from this country on the New York Kicks led to his name being combined with “Insanity”. The 2002 first round pick was a player from this country selected by the Houston Rockets. For 10 points, name this country of Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming.ANSWER: China

Notably --- Jeremy Lin is from the US (California, even), which is distinctly not China. Not to mention many other issues I have with this question as-written, but come on folks --- at the very least, please fact check your material before putting it into a question set.

I could go on (this post was much longer), but I don't want to be too hard on Toronto here. It was ambitious of them to want to produce a tournament, and that's fantastic. A suggestion would be to get help from people with more experience, though. If you're going to attempt to produce a set and you feel like you're struggling, ask for support. I'm sure any number of people on these message boards would have been happy to work on the set (probably for a small fee) to bring it up to something resembling modern standards of good quiz bowl. Had someone like Rob Carson or Ike Jose touched this set, I would have likely been orders of magnitude happier when I received it.

But if you can recognize that the set you produced has significant faults, then Jesus Christ, don't let people mirror it. Or, for that matter, don't host it at all without a major disclaimer acknowledging the quality of the set. People invest time and money to attend quiz bowl events, and I wasn't prepared to let my teams (especially ones traveling to Orlando from as far as Chipola) play on something sub-par.

As said, next year --- I'll probably spearhead efforts to produce my own hybrid set if only to (hopefully) avoid as many headaches as I had this time around.

Travis VitelloUniversity of Florida '08The Ohio State University '14Writer, NAQT